Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [10]
I never thought of him as an older brother. It would have meant accepting that he was somehow looking out for me, that I wasn’t independent, that I needed someone else.
Carter Vanderbilt Cooper. That was my brother’s name. Strange. I rarely say it out loud anymore. I thought we had a silent agreement, that we would both just get through our childhoods and meet up as adults on the other side. I imagined one day we would be friends, allies, brothers laughing about our past fights. I’m not sure why he didn’t keep his end of the bargain. Maybe he never knew about our silent pact. Maybe it was all in my head.
“WHENEVER WE PASS this temple my youngest points out and says, ‘My brother died here,’” a mother in Kamburugamuwa tells me, her eyes watering. “I explain to him, ‘Don’t worry. He’s in another world. He’s in heaven now.’”
We’ve set up a camera in a classroom near the temple, and a half-dozen women sit outside, waiting for their chance to talk. Some clutch grainy photos of their lost children; some hold only their memories. Each wants to speak, however, wants her pain known, her child’s absence felt.
“My daughter was very serious in her studies,” one mother tells me. “My son; he was always messing around with the other kids.” Both her children drowned in the temple. Their bodies were found near each other.
“I can’t go home anymore,” she says. “In my head, I see them messing around. I feel like my children are still playing out in the garden.”
We will not be able to use all these women’s words. It’s too much detail, too many interviews to transcribe. So many mothers are waiting to talk, however. I can’t turn any of them away.
“How do you go on?” I ask one mother.
She does not understand the question. “We have to go on,” she finally says. “What choice do we have?”
“We all suffer together,” another woman says, and for a moment I imagine she somehow knows my history, then am embarrassed that I would think that. She was with her six children at the temple when the wave hit. One of her daughters died. The rest survived by clinging to a coconut tree.
“It’s better to talk,” she says, “to tell stories to each other. It helps to overcome the grief.”
What she says is true, I know that much, but I still find myself unable to do it, even though my pain isn’t nearly as great. After my father died, my mother still talked about him, reminding us of things he’d said. I’d listen, nod my head, but I couldn’t join in. I couldn’t say a word. Walking in this village, listening to these people, is as close as I can come.
A fisherman named Dayratna stands in a grove behind his shack, hanging his daughter’s wet schoolbooks in the branches of a tree. He wants to dry them out. The books are the only reminder he has of his daughter. Everything else—her photos, her clothes—were swept away. Dilini Sandarmali, that was her name. She was eleven years old.
“When I tried to remove my daughter’s body from the temple,” he whispers, his voice hoarse from crying, “I found her lying with two of her friends.”
Dayratna is not sure what to do next. He won’t return to work, because he can’t face the sea. “I don’t want to see the ocean again,” he says wearily. “I curse the sea.”
At first you want to know what happened in each house, to each heart, but after a while you no longer ask. Too much has already been said. The words fail to have meaning, fail to get at the depth of the sorrow. I look into the eyes of these mothers grieving for their children.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. It comes out sounding so small.
I find it hard to listen to these people’s stories. They remind me so much